UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

Michelle Alexander is a justly celebrated civil rights lawyer, legal scholar, and the author of the widely acclaimed 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. She has recently been appointed a columnist for the New York Times, a mixed blessing, for it places her on par with some notorious Hasbara propaganda officers daily at work in that fine institution of American liberal imperialism.

What is Ms Alexander’s debut opinion about one of the gravest injustices in the world? Some 70 years of an armed robbery of a people’s homeland and the incremental genocide of its inhabitants, now this sudden “wake-up call” and a bashful request to talk about the facts.

The New York Times and the Zionist propaganda machinery it best represents have set the bar of talking about the Israeli settler colony so low that this open and honest confession of moral cowardice passes for courage and conviction.

As these examples demonstrate, corporate media has moved from concealing Israel’s violence to openly justifying its genocidal acts as necessary counter-terrorism policy. As patently absurd as these narratives are, they continue to be a potent and dangerous force in normalizing Israel’s ethnocratic settler-colonial project. Blaming Hamas and portraying it as an almighty force intent on destroying Israel is used to dehumanize and demonize all Palestinians, who are stripped of their agency. Through this rhetoric, outlets like The New York Times implicitly justify the extermination of the Palestinian people.